APOLLO ROULETTE, PART 2

by Brian Baker

In part 2 of ‘Apollo Roulette’, Brian Baker’s sequel to ‘Iterative Architecture: a Ballardian Text’, an ‘auto-displacement’ Ian Fleming/J.G. Ballard mashup, Baker continues to apply the method to desert imagery in Ballard’s work.

In this, the final thrilling instalment, Baker finally uncovers the deadly secret that powers the American ‘nuclear state’: an apocalyptic game of APOLLO ROULETTE!

Now read on for Part 2, or return to Part 1 and the supercharged moment when it all began!

Serenity. Patient B had been driving his Aston Martin convertible towards La Tzoumaz on a clear, sunny early summer’s day. According to the Swiss police reports appended to the file Bluffield had received from the Service, there were signs of a second automobile in the vicinity of the accident, but the Aston was the lone vehicle found at the crash site. The car had ricocheted from the stone balustrade and careered across the road, impacting against the wall of the mountain road almost head-on. The passenger in the car, Theresa B, his wife of some four days, was killed instantaneously. Despite impact fractures to knees, leg and hip, B escaped major trauma to vital organs, although blood loss was marked. B had remained conscious while Swiss paramedics and emergency rescue teams had reached the crash site an estimated 90 minutes after the incident, and was also conscious while being extricated from the crushed cabin of the Aston. He was airlifted to a private clinic in Geneva, while his wife’s remains were returned to her family in Marseille.

Viva Las Vegas. In Ballard’s ‘Myths of the Near Future’, Sheppard finds his resurrected wife Elaine in what was once ‘no more than a park-keeper’s hut, some bird-watcher’s weekend hide transformed by the light of its gathering identities into this miniature casino’ (1082). The impacted, ‘annealed’ images of itself project the hut into some kind of ideal state, just as Sheppard had encountered the elderly images of a roadside hamlet transfigured into younger, idealised versions of themselves earlier in the story. Sheppard mis-recognises the co-presence of multiple identities as Las Vegas neon, a profane city of light illuminating Cold War deserts.

When Eight Bells Toll. ‘You could have asked me, B, instead of sneaking around like a thief in the back yard,’ said Felicity as they drove in the Cadillac towards Groom Lake. ‘I think we’ve found our mail has gone unanswered lately,’ said B, trying not to sound affronted. ‘And in any case, my trespass is not exactly, well, official.’ Felicity looked over at her long-time friend and colleague, and saw a ragged, rather bruised man, and not from his recent ordeal. ‘We’d heard that you’d had an accident, or that you’d gone rogue,’ she said, frowning. ‘Licence revoked?’ ‘No, not exactly,’ he said, looking back at her ruefully, ‘but it’s more than what you’d call a holiday. I think they wanted me to take a little rest in a village they have set up on the coast, but I needed some answers first.’ As they drew up to the checkpoint, B asked, ‘Do we have clearance?’ ‘Not to worry,’ said Felicity. ‘Forget the Official Secrets Act. You’re in God’s Own Country now. Welcome to Wonderland.’

Fugue Time. Ballard’s paired stories ‘News from the Sun’ and ‘Memories of the Space Age’, plus ‘Myths of the Near Future’ have analogous structures.[1] The protagonist, a doctor, undergoing the effects of ‘space sickness’ connected to the NASA space program, searches for a ‘door in the universe’ out of time itself. The protagonist’s wife, emotionally or sexually involved with a provocative, perhaps unbalanced male antagonist, precedes her husband into the zone of transcendence (symbolically if not literally). In ‘Myths of the Near Future’, this is figured as a kind of resurrection. Mallory, in ‘Memories of the Space Age’, a flight-physician once attached to the Shuttle program, travels back to Florida to confront the meaning of the space sickness, and the former astronaut Hinton, whose murder of a fellow astronaut in orbit precipitates the time-crisis. Hinton now occupies the Cape Kennedy launching grounds. Mallory suffers from, and gradually starts to embrace increasing periods of ‘fugue time’, when he enters a kind of fugue and time coagulates, then solidifies around him. This is most iconic in the ‘block’ of water he suspends himself in when submerged in Gale Shepley’s swimming pool: ‘Once he immersed himself in the pool, delighted to be embedded in this huge block of condensed time’ (1059).

Artwork by Jeffrey K. Potter for ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (commissioned for Ballard’s short-story collection Memories of the Space Age).

In his musings about Gale’s pet cheetahs, or the tiger kept in a nearby cage (whose door he would like to open) there is something Edenic about Mallory’s appreciation of fugue-time: the lion can indeed lie down with the lamb in ‘condensed time’. As in ‘News from the Sun’ the space/ time-sickness is a doorway to transcendence, precipitated by the space program but superseding it. At the end of ‘News from the Sun’, the doctor Franklin (who had worked at a clinic treating astronauts and other who exhibited fugue symptoms, as he does himself) and the astronaut’s daughter Ursula Trippett speak a kind of infant ‘babble’ in fugue, an index of a return to human existence prior to the fall of language (Babel) or even the structuration of the subject. While an earlier story, ‘Mr F is Mr F’ narrates a male protagonist’s return (literally) to the womb, this is figured as vampiric, and the story ultimately descends itself into misogyny. In the ‘fugue time’ stories, the return to a uterine pre-subjectivity is cast as a polyvalent, multiple continuity with a revivified nature (where even the desert is restored by endlessly multiplying palm trees, reproduced perceptually in, and out of, time).

Level 9. As they entered facility 51, two technicians in white protective suits barred their way into the atrium. ‘Sorry,’ said Felicity. ‘I’m afraid they’ll give you the full decontamination treatment, as you’ve never been here before. We have some, ah, friends in this facility that might catch a cold. I’ll go through and see you downstairs later.’ She left him to be guided into a booth, where he undressed and threw his clothes into a chute to be incinerated. His body was inspected, enumerated, diagnosed. His skin, cleaned, depilated and abraded. His brain, scanned. His torso and vital organs monitored, his internal fluids filtered. His hair, cropped; his chin, chest and genitals shaved; his eyes, inspected by a senior ophthalmic surgeon; his mouth, investigated by an orthodontist; his anus, probed by a noted proctologist. At each cleansing, at each scan, he descended down a level, from red, to yellow, to purple, to grey, to white. As he cleared Scanning, dressed all in white, his body glowing, he felt altogether a new man.

The winged man. Flight is a recurring motif in Ballard’s oeuvre, and Gregory Stephenson notes this in relation to Crash:

The imagery by which the transcendent character of the experience of automobile collision [...] conveyed in the novel is that of light and luminosity, of ascension or flight.[2]

This imagery is found throughout Ballard’s writing, most notably in the stories ‘News from the Sun’, ‘Memories of the Space Age’ and ‘Myths of the Near Future’, but can also be found in the novel The Unlimited Dream Company (written around the same time, and published in 1979, but set in Ballard’s own locale, Shepperton). There, the protagonist Blake crashes a light aircraft into the Thames at the beginning of the novel, but achieves a curious kind of resurrection. He brings with him fantastical powers to transform the suburb of London. At one point in the narrative, he attempts, Pied Piper-like, to draw the townsfolk into the air:

The sky was brightening as we rose through the cool air. I felt the townspeople lying serenely within me, sleeping passengers in this ascending gondola propelled by some profound upward dream. They were carrying me away towards the sun, eager to lose themselves in a communion of light’.[3]

This ascension ultimately fails, but in the contemporaneous stories, the flight imagery is indeed connected with an escape from time. They also have an evolutionary dynamic. In ‘Memories of the Space Age’, Hinton, the astronaut-murderer, is first seen flying WWI biplanes. As the narrative progresses, the aircraft ‘descend’ the evolutionary ladder in terms of powered flight: ‘as every day passed these veteran machines tended to be of increasingly older vintage’ (1041). Like Kerans in The Drowned World, whose consciousness descends back ‘down the spinal column’ as the novel goes on, evolution in Ballard’s texts is typed both in terms of a kind of de-evolutionary imperative for the human psyche (towards the liberation or transcendence offered by the ‘macrocosmic zero’) and in terms of the false ‘progress’ of evolutionary mis-steps. The NASA space program is itself figured as an ‘evolutionary crime’ in ‘News from the Sun’ (1019), one that ‘cracks the hour-glass of time’ and causes the fugues and ‘space sickness’.

By contrast, human-powered heavier-than-air craft are typed as benign: Gale Shepley, the murdered astronaut’s daughter, pilots one in ‘Memories of the Space Age’; Martinsen flies a ‘cat’s cradle of plastic film and piano wire’ (1063) in ‘Myths of the Near Future’; and in Hello America, the fleet of crystalline aircraft that appear above Las Vegas at the end of the narrative indicate most clearly the fragility of this image of flight as transcendence. The mythic, metaphorical imagery of flight always supersedes human attempts to traverse the heavens, from Kittihawk to Cape Kennedy. The image that encapsulates this is at the beginning of ‘Myths of the Near Future’, where Sheppard sits in the cockpit of a crash-landed Cessna on Cocoa Beach. After being rescued from the stranded craft, Sheppard realises that Martinsen has drawn a massive Aztec bird upon the sand, which grasps the Cessna symbolically in its talons. Soon after, the light aircraft is caught by the tide and broken into pieces.

Islands. Bluffield found it difficult, in fact nearly impossible, to penetrate the psychological armature patient B had erected. He would not talk about his wife, nor about the crash itself. In exchange for the run of the clinic and its park, B had agreed to keep a journal. Bluffield had hoped that the estranged form, the distance between writing and reading, might allow B to slip his armour, inadvertently perhaps. Any signs or clues would be an improvement on the impassive non-engagement Bluffield faced on a daily basis. Bluffield lit a cigarette and opened B’s journal. He found there technical drawings, calculations, a series of versions of da Vinci machines, worked through again and again, compulsively, exactingly. It provided little enough evidence of anything but the precision and determination B had demonstrated throughout his career. Bluffield was not surprised, but still, a little disappointed.

On his second read-through, Bluffield thought he had indeed found what he was looking for. On a page dominated by a drawing of an aero-screw, covered almost entirely by mathematical equations, a compulsive palimpsest, Bluffield read: ‘Report on the assassination of Theresa B by unknown forces.’ Bluffield looked for a continuation throughout the journal, but found nothing. The phrase itself was illuminating, revealing a high degree of paranoia; the seeming externalisation of guilt as outside agency; the ascribing of malign purpose in the word ‘assassination’; and once more, the desire to estrange and distance in the objective ‘report’. But was there a connection between the phrase and the drawings?

Double constellations. In his essay ‘The Solar Anus’, Georges Bataille conjures images of circularity which are bound up both with elemental (natural) forces and with sexuality, figured as an excessive dream in which a man lying in bed with his female lover inhabits some kind of cosmological pattern of arousal: ‘trees bristle the ground with a vast quantity of flowered shafts raised up to the sun. [...] From the movement of the sea, uniform coitus of the earth with the moon, comes the polymorphous and organic coitus of the earth with the sun’.[4] The phallicism of masculine desire is arrayed against the liquidity of the feminine: ‘The sea, then, has played the role of the female organ that liquefies under the excitation of the penis’ (7). The essay encodes a growing excitation, with the sexual images becoming more extreme and violent, until the penultimate paragraph in which the narrator declares ‘I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night’ (9). Sexuality and violence (violation) are a crucial connection for Bataille, as a kind of overflow or excess (a key term) which countermand the imperatives of taboo that order and regulate work towards work and reason: ‘there is in nature and there subsists in man a movement which always exceeds the bounds, that can never be anything but partially reduced to order’.[5] This excess does not equate with transgression, however, for ‘transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it’ (63).

Poster for Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun.

Transgression, paired with taboo, are organised into a social system that regulates expenditure and consumption. The sun, for Bataille, becomes what Fred Botting and Scott Wilson call ‘the supreme solar giver. Giving heat, light, life, the sun signifies the purest form of the gift, pouring out energy with no thought of return.’[6] This expenditure is the type and source of excess or overflow, and in ‘The Solar Anus’ is explicitly marked as violent: ‘The Sun exclusively love the Night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shaft, toward the earth, but finds it incapable of reaching the gaze or the night, even though the nocturnal territorial expanses head continuously toward the indecency of the solar ray’ (9). The Sun is the frustrated lover of the Night, the night which finds its own material image in the anus of the young woman. Defecation is (though the image of the volcano) opposed to, yet is analogous to the orgasmic expenditure of the sun’s ejaculation; love, screaming in the narrator’s throat, is ‘the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun’ (9). Parody, however, connects: ‘each thing is a parody of another’ (5). At the beginning of the essay, the narrator screams ‘I AM THE SUN’ (5), but the rest of the essay marks the inability of that sun/subject to achieve orgasm, remaining in a state of excitation. The Sun, the desiring male subject, desires the night, the anus of the young female lover, but ultimately the opposition between sun and anus, transcendent overflow and base materiality, collapses into the palindrome of the sun/anus: ‘the solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is the night’ (9).

The Tenth Circle. Hand in hand, B and Felicity, dressed in identical environment suits of bright white cloth, wandered into the Garden, a habitat of gymnosperms, ferns and bryophytes, located on Level 9. Kneeling by the side of a pathway was a small man in a white labcoat, digging with a hand-trowel in the tilth. Hearing them, he stood up, brushed his hands together to remove the earth, and waited for them, both hands extended in welcome – or benediction. ‘How are our friends?’ asked Felicity. ‘All is well,’ replied the man, in English with a light French accent. ‘Introductions,’ smiled Felicity. ‘B, this is Doctor Lacombe, the Director of our Institute of Xenogamy here at the facility. Doctor, this is B, a visitor.’ ‘A visitor?’ repeated Lacombe. ‘Are we all not visitors here, at the centre of the Earth?’ Lacombe moved to B’s side, interlocked his arm, and began to walk them through the Garden. ‘I think you must have come a long way to find us, my dear B. What is it that you want?’ ‘Certainty,’ said B.

Apostles of the Prismatic Sun. In Ballard’s Crash, the terminal transgression occurs when the narrator ‘James Ballard’ sodomizes Vaughan, the renegade scientist. Ballard meets Vaughan for the last time in “the mezzanine lounge of the Oceanic Terminal [...] this house of glass, of flight and possibility”.[7] They then both take LSD, and embark on a drive through London. The city is transformed into a tableau of light, and this vision is accompanied by both physical intimacy and images of transcendence:

Taking my eyes off the road, I clasped Vaughan’s hand in my own, trying to close my eyes to the fountain of light that poured through the windshield of the car from the vehicles approaching us. An armada of angelic creatures, each surrounded by an immense corona of light, was landing on the motorway either side of us. [...] With my right hand I parted his buttocks, feeling for the hot vent of his anus. For several minutes, as the cabin walls glowed and shifted, as if trying to take up the deformed geometry of the crashed cars outside, I laid my penis at the mouth of his rectum. [...] As I moved in and out of his rectum the light-borne vehicles soaring along the motorway drew the semen from my testicles. [...] Sitting together, we were washed by the light flowing in every direction across the landscape (21: 199; 202).

The sun/anus is achieved through a consummation of the act of sodomy deferred in Bataille’s ‘The Solar Anus’, but this transcendence is only temporary. At the beginning of the next chapter, Ballard experiences a vision of a ‘retinal horde’, a veil of flies that returns him to the base material, the excremental: ‘Flies crawled across the oil-smeared windshield, vibrating against the glass. The chains of their bodies formed a blue veil between myself and the traffic moving along the motorway. I turned on the windshield wipers, but the blades swept through the flies without disturbing them. Vaughan lay back on the seat beside me, trousers around his knees. [...] The flies covered Vaughan’s face, hovering around his mouth and nostrils as if waiting for the rancid liquors distilled from the body of a corpse’ (22: 204). Transcendence, visions of angels and of light, collapse back into the pit. The excremental vision is also found in Ballard’s The Drowned World (1963), where London, transformed into a post-catastrophic lagoon, is drained: ‘Veils of scum draped from the criss-crossing telegraph wires and tilting neon signs, and a thin coating of silt cloaked the faces of the buildings, turned the once limpid beauty of the underwater city into a drained and festering sewer’.[8] For Ballard, beneath the visions of light there always lurks the materiality of shit.

Ocean’s Eleven. ‘I want to know what is really happening’, said B. ‘Is this really happening?’ asked Lacombe. ‘Why, where do you think you are?’ ‘In Wonderland…’ said B, gazing at this primeval Garden folded deep within the Earth. ‘Dr Lacombe, will the visitors..?’ Lacombe smiled patiently. ‘Return your wife to you? Perhaps only if you do not look over your shoulder on the way back to the surface.’ Lacombe guided them through the Garden towards a portal, where he stopped, stood before B and took his hands. ‘I cannot tell you what you will find’, he said. ‘It may be the answer you seek. It may be a doorway into a very private hell. Do you wish to continue?’ B nodded slowly. ‘You are sure, I can see. Very well, my dear B. I envy you.’

News from the Sun. ‘[I]t seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time [....] And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.’[9]

Majestic Twelve. ‘Come with me,’ Felicity said as she punched the code into the portal lock. As the door ascended in its frame, they entered an enormous space, like an aircraft hanger the size of a landing field. He looked behind him to see control booths and a large screen; before them, lights receded into the darkness. As they began to halo and evanesce, he looked up into the darkness of the roof space. Stars constellated the darkness, and as he watched, they began to move and congregate, patterning onto whorls and galaxies and spiral arms. The lights expanded, moved downwards. Time cooled. Amber, cobalt and scarlet balls floated above the apron, sentient, glowing. He watched as a large presence, dark light, extruded from the vault, extended downwards, and pulsed halfway along the runway. He looked down and saw his hands sparkle, flaked with gold, flickering with crystalline images of themselves, a diamantine body occupying the same space as himself. His clean, pure body rang with celestial song. Felicity smiled, her head Madonna-like, eyes burning with divine fire. He watched in wonder as angels began to drift down from the stars, their beauty a thousand suns. He raised his arms and began to ascend into the air, his body encased in a celestial coronation armour. He embraced the secret and benign inhabitants of the air, their love a star that filled him with white.

Thirteen to Centaurus. In total, there were eleven manned Apollo missions ‘proper’. Apollo 7 to 10 were training and testing flights, two in Earth orbit, two in lunar orbit. Apollo 11, crewed by Neil Armstrong, ‘Buzz’ Aldrin and Michael Collins, were the first Apollo mission to land on the surface of the moon, in July 1969. Apollo 12 was crewed by Pete Conrad, Alan Bean and Richard Gordon, who, at the charismatic Conrad’s instigation, wore identical Hawaiian shirts and bought identical sports cars when training. Apollo 12’s Saturn V was struck by lightning – twice – on takeoff, but the crew managed to avoid aborting the mission. Al Bean subsequently left NASA and now paints highly colourful painting of lunar landscapes, incorporating actual moondust and pieces of his mission patches. Apollo 14’s Commander, Alan Shepherd, the only one of the original ‘Mercury Seven’ astronauts (commemorated by Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff) to command an Apollo mission, took a golf club with him and played on the lunar surface.[10] Apollo 17 was the last lunar mission, in 1972. Apollo 18-20 were cancelled due to budgetary constraints. Apollo 13’s mission nearly ended in disaster. An explosion aboard the craft on the way to the moon meant that the landing was aborted, and the lunar module used as a ‘life raft’ to get the crew back to Earth.

However, these would not have been the first casualties of the Apollo program. Apollo 1 (as it was later designated) never launched. Its crew, Virgil (Gus) Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, were killed on the launch pad when a fire swept through the Command Module in a test situation. There are two plaques remaining on the launch pad where the disaster occurred. One reads: LAUNCH COMPLEX 34, Friday, 27 January 1967, 1831 Hours. Dedicated to the living memory of the crew of the Apollo 1: USAF. Lt. Colonel Virgil I. Grissom, USAF. Lt. Colonel Edward H. White, II, U.S.N. Lt. Commander Roger B Chaffee. They gave their lives in service to their country in the ongoing exploration of humankind’s final frontier. Remember them not for how they died but for those ideals for which they lived.

The other reads: In memory of those who made the ultimate sacrifice so others could reach for the stars, Ad astra per aspera, [a rough road leads to the stars] God speed to the crew of Apollo 1.

From the photographic series Astronaut Suicides by Neil Dacosta.

Storms. Doctor Bluffield set down the sheaf of case notes and walked to the large window of his office. As he stood and watched two nurses hurry across the afternoon furnace of the piazza, he realised the futility of his work with Patient B. B’s refusal to engage in discussion about the death of his wife, his refusal even to acknowledge it, indicated some deeper trauma. ‘He clearly feels a deep-seated guilt about the death of his wife,’ said Bluffield, ‘but I simply cannot reach him. Perhaps it is time to consider a more radical form of therapy.’ He turned and smiled at his female colleague, who was sitting in the Eames chair opposite his desk. ‘I know you’ve published on psycho-drama and role-play, Felicity. What is your clinical opinion about its possible effectiveness in patient B’s case?’

Coda: Apollo 13. He woke up in his room at the Stardust. It was dark. He fell off the bed, groped to the bathroom and turned on the light. In the mirror he saw a shaven man, stubbled skull, naked, eyes a scorched blue. A straight razor had been dropped in the sink. He closed his eyes and pressed his hands together. Clearly he would find no answers in Las Vegas, nor in the desert. He would have to go to the launching grounds at Canaveral. Perhaps, among the gantries and the detritus of the Apollo program, he would find peace, and find her again.

Now return to Part 1 and the supercharged moment when Brian Baker’s APOLLO ROULETTE all began!

[1] J.G. Ballard, ‘News from the Sun’, pp.1010-1036; ‘Memories of the Space Age’, pp.1037-1060; ‘Myths of the Near Future’, pp.1061-1084; The Complete Short Stories (London: Flamingo, 2001).
[2] Gregory Stephenson, Out of the Night and into the Dream: A Thematic Study of J.G. Ballard (New York, Westport CT & London: Greenwood Press, 1991), p.71.
[3] J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) (London: Triad/Panther, 1981), ch.27, p.161.
[4] Georges Bataille, ‘The Solar Anus’, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1985), p.7.
[5] Bataille, Eroticism (1957) trans. Mary Dalwood (New York & London: Marion Boyars, 1987), p. 40.
[6] Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, Bataille (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2001), p.96.
[7] J.G. Ballard, Crash (1973) (London: Vintage, 1995), ch.21, p.193.
[8] J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1963) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), ch.10, p.119.
[9] Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971) (London: Flamingo, 1993), p.67; p.68.
[10] Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff  (1980) (London: Picador, 1990).

APOLLO ROULETTE, PART 1

by Brian Baker

In this sequel to ‘Iterative Architecture: a Ballardian Text’, an ‘auto-displacement’ Ian Fleming/J.G. Ballard mashup, Brian Baker applies the method to desert imagery in Ballard’s work.

Finally, Baker uncovers the hidden logic at play in the American ‘nuclear state’ – a deadly game of APOLLO ROULETTE!

Tune into Ballardian.com for Part 2: the final thrilling instalment of Brian Baker’s Apollo Roulette!

Double Zero Wheel. He clicked the cartridge into the chamber of the service revolver, carefully closed the cylinder, and placed the mouth of the barrel against his temple. What was it he had said to Markham? ‘I understand that double-O’s have a very short life expectancy.’ He wondered now how many of those deaths were suicides. Somehow the service revolver seemed right, for doing the decent thing. He had killed too many men with the Walther, and didn’t want to be a notch on his own gun.

The Gernsback Continuum. At the beginning of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), the narrator and his attorney are on the way to cover the ‘fabulous Mint 400’ in Las Vegas. The text famously begins: ‘We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas’ (3). Thompson is driving along the former Route 66, now known as Interstate 15. To the west of Barstow is Edwards Air Force Base. Edwards was the site of the X-plane testing program in the 1950s, which eventually gave way to the ‘spam in a can’ astronautics of the Friendship, Mercury and Apollo programs. The men of Edwards Air Force Base, ‘folk heroes of our time’ according to Lyndon Johnson,[1] inhabited a variant of frontier masculinity appropriate to Edwards’s desert setting, and was exploited in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and its screen adaptation.

Thompson, driving east of Edwards towards Barstow, experiences an hallucination, a fata morgana, a common desert phenomenon. Brought on by the desert light and psychotropic drugs, Thompson hallucinates what William Gibson, in ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, would call ‘semiotic ghosts’, ‘semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own’.[2] In this story, the narrator encounters a vision of ‘the air thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things [...], mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters [and] smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury’ (8-9). He sees Tucson as ‘a dream Tucson thrown up out of the collective yearning of an era’ (9), ‘an idealized city that drew on Metropolis and Things to Come’ (8). Thompson sees not a fascist utopia, but bats; and not bats, but UFOs; and these UFOs are the semiotic phantoms of the American Space Program made manifest by a cocktail of narcotics and desert speed.

One, Two, Three. No, not yet. He lowered the gun and placed it gently on the glass-topped table by his right hand, where it settled with a hard double click. His hand went automatically to the shaker and poured the last of the vodka martini, but he already felt nauseated by the two glasses he had downed before. Dutch courage? He shuddered. He really was finished if he needed help to pull the trigger. Some of his fellow agents, he knew, had descended into a whiskey-sodden fugue before the inevitable end had come, a danger to themselves and to others and their deaths ultimately something of a mercy. When the instrument begins to feel, he thought, it’s past time for the Service to hone the edge of a new blade.

Algebras of chance. In Hello America, the roulette wheel becomes the means by which the deranged President Manson decides which of the ruined cities of America to target with the remaining stockpile of cruise missiles and ICBMs. In the words of President Manson, Ballard diagnoses the ‘American dream’ of migration and aspiration as a gamble, with Las Vegas the latter-day cradle of the modern USA. ‘Europe doesn’t exist for me any more, Wayne – except that I see that it is waking now like an old dog, smelling us here and trying to get its snout into this new America I’ve built. It was a gamble, Wayne, a gamble with my own life. I put everything on the one spin of the wheel each of us is given, a small stack of dreams and hopes’ (153). Manson’s is a materialist vision, lacking the transcendent: even hopes and dreams are but small chips in an unwinnable game.

Clouds. Doctor Bluffield stood at his office window and gazed across the piazza of the clinic, which opened towards the saucer-shaped water tower that blazed white in the southwestern sun. The clinic was a plate-glass spacecraft fallen among the green knolls of the science park. The sculpted gardens reflected the serenity of purpose of the bio-medical corporation under whose aegis the clinic operated. The clinic’s main building incorporated a heat-reflective skin which maintained a carefully-controlled temperate environment within. Outside, the heat was well over a hundred degrees, according to the monitor on Bluffield’s desk. In the piazza, by the fountain – an indulgence in this climate, as were the lawns – a man in a loose-fitting, white tracksuit was calmly proceeding though a T’ai Chi warm-down sequence,  like some kind of swaddled and articulated mannequin.

Fata Morgana. Vermillion Sands is a desert resort that is the location of a sequence of short stories that were collected in the 1971 volume Vermillion Sands.[3] In the fantastical desert space of the resort and its outlying desert villas, Lagoon West and Lizard Key, glider pilots carve cloud formations into mobile sculpture, flying ‘sand rays’ are hunted akin to the Albatross in Coleridge’s ‘The Ancient Mariner’, and the pathologies of the resort’s inhabitants – movie stars, poets, glitterati – are made manifest. In ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’, a psychotropic house, in which a film star murdered her husband, ‘recalls’ these emotions and causes the relationship of the new inhabitants to disintegrate. In a sense, ‘Stellavista’ is a ghost story, a haunted-house narrative. The emotional ‘ghosts’ are technological revenants; the house itself takes on the psychosis of its owner as a kind of pathological prosthesis, and itself becomes murderous. The pathology of the male narrator also becomes aligned with the trauma encoded in the house’s psychoactive circuits and the phantasmal ‘presence’ of the femme fatale/ murderess, Gloria Tremayne. 99 Stellavista is a classic Ballardian pathologised technology that threatens but ‘beckons more and more persuasively from the margins of the technological landscape’.[4]

Two Tribes. In the morning B hired an open-topped Corvette Sting Ray and put the hiking gear in the trunk, using the Swiss passport and a sheaf of soft dollar bills he had won at blackjack two nights before. It certainly wasn’t baccarat at the Royale, but the sharp spike of adrenalin, even dressed in casual clothes among these holidaying Midwesterners, so anxious to lose their roll, as they called it, was gratifying. It was even something of a relief. If it wasn’t the pleasures of the roulette wheel in the warmth of a Mediterranean evening, at least it wasn’t sitting alone with a loaded revolver at his right hand. The heat was oppressive on Highway 15 as it spooled north from the city limits. The resort shrank like a discarded postcard in the rear-view mirror, and like those other desert cities, Phoenix and Reno, seemed as unreal as a fata morgana once left behind. Runnels of sweat slicked his white linen shirt to his back, and he had to blink away salty droplets behind the incognito of his glasses. The desert called to him, but the still-rational remainder of his mind worried that the Corvette might not prove reliable. He didn’t like the idea of buzzards and coyotes picking at his bones. It reminded him too much of what he did for the Service.

Image: ‘Las Vegas Club’ by Troy Paiva.

Synchronoclasmique. ‘The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert all around the town. The air-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as against the radiant heat outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights to the violence of the sun’s rays. Nights of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the desert. Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural order of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it too has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion. Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the heat of the desert – a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of the traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth.’[5]

Three Days of the Condor. He awoke in the passenger seat of the Corvette, parked under some scrub out of sight of the highway. He had tried to limit his water intake in order to preserve his supplies for his hike to Groom Lake, and had taken the salt tablets, but still he felt drained by the sun. The relative coolness of the evening revived him slightly as he climbed out of the automobile and retrieved his gear from the trunk. Night was falling over the Range like a soft rain. A bar of gold light at the horizon faded as he looked up at the enormous sky, the constellations seemingly close enough to touch. He had heard that other lights, other shooting stars, had been seen in the Tikaboo valley and by motorists on Route 375, but he dismissed these reports as black propaganda. Since the demise of the Sky Flash program, British involvement in advanced aeronautics had been limited to client status, and the Service would dearly have liked to obtain hard information about what research was being pursued at NAFR. His trespass would not be the first by a British agent, and he often wondered what side he was meant to be on. This intrusion, however, had its own agenda.

Survival Kits. Throughout The Atrocity Exhibition (1969), a collection of experimental short-story ‘condensed novels’, there are references to a group of items (photographs, documents, physical objects) called a ‘kit’: there are eleven in total.[6] Kits are also found in ‘News from the Sun’ and ‘Myths of the Near Future’. In ‘News from the Sun’, the kit is a ‘shrine’ left for the doctor Franklin by Slade, the would-be astronaut whom Franklin refused to allow on the space program on psychological grounds.  The kit consists of: a fragment of lunar rock; a photograph of Marion Franklin in the shower; a faded reproduction of Dali’s Persistence of Memory; a set of leucotomes; an emergency brain donor card (1016). The function of such a kit is made much more explicit in ‘Myths of the Near Future’, where Sheppard suggests that the kit is a ‘machine, of a kind. A time-machine’ (1077). It consists of: ‘a framed reproduction of Magritte’s The March of Summer, a portable video-cassette projector, two tins of soup, a well-thumbed set of six Kamera Klassic magazines, a clutch of cassettes labelled Elaine/Shower Stall I-XXV, and a paperback selection of Marey’s Chronograms’ (1068).This ‘survival kit’ (‘of a special kind’) is quite typical in its references to Marey, Surrealist art, sexual experimentation or transgression, and visual technology. These are themselves condensed representations of key Ballardian icons and concerns: time, sex, vision.

The Four Horsemen. It had been simple enough to evade the guards in their pick-up, though the warnings about the use of deadly force on the ‘Restricted Area’ signs had given him some pause. Trespass was one thing, but shooting dead an American serviceman, even an armed one, was something else entirely. He kept tramping in the cool desert air, his body responding as of old to exertion and deprivation. He felt the straps of the backpack on his shoulders, but the discomfort was familiar and welcome. The first fingers of dawn light were haloing the horizon off to his left, and so he had perhaps an hour until he needed to find a hide, from the sun and from surveillance. He wasn’t far from Groom Lake now, but would wait until tonight to try to penetrate the area proper. Until then, he would manage his body’s needs, and his thoughts.

Signs of the mineral. ‘Why [...] are the deserts so fascinating? It is because you are delivered from all depth there – a brilliant, mobile, superficial neutrality, a challenge to meaning and profundity, a challenge to nature and culture, an outer hyperspace, with no origin, no reference points.’[7]

Space/Time Crisis. As he walked down the main staircase, Bluffield could see the man in white framed in the large windows that let polarised light into the atrium of the clinic. The man was a rather troubling patient, but there was little enough to distinguish him from either his fellow patients or the clinicians. Bluffield left the building by the large plate-glass doors and immediately began to perspire. He stepped across the paving to where the man went through his warm-down exercises.

‘How are you with muscle strains, Professor?’ asked the man. ‘Do they come under your area of expertise?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Bluffield.

‘So you can mend complicated machines,’ said the man, indicating his forehead suggestively, ’but not simple ones?’

‘I don’t really consider myself an engineer,’ said Bluffield.

‘The metaphysical rather than the material?’ asked the man. ‘Well, never mind, I’ll persevere.’ He continued with his slow, graceful articulations.

‘Two o’clock,’ said Bluffield brusquely, somewhat nettled by the man’s self-possession. He resumed his walk across to the car park. The water tower cast a dark shadow in the morning light. The fronds of the palms, moving in the slight breeze, whispered some secret arboreal language to the desert air.

Image: Atomic fireball, Trinity test, White Sands, 1945.

Alamagordo. ‘The first atomic-bomb test against the backdrop of White Sands, the pale blue backcloth of the mountains and hundreds of miles of white sand – the blinding artificial light of the bomb against the blinding light of the ground.’[8]

Saturn V. His chest screamed as he ran in ballooning strides down the scree slope, a tiny avalanche of dust and gravel ploughing ahead of him. The hammering blades of the helicopter broke waves of pulverizing sound upon his head as he dashed sideways out of the searchlight beam, a jack-rabbit fleeing the hunter’s gun. He felt he was being flushed towards a trap, but exhaustion and terror dulled his reactions. Time became a chain of moments as he hopped from rock to rock, scuttled from brush to brush in a vain attempt to deceive his pursuers. He ran up a cleft in the rocks, a small island on the desert floor, hoping for some crevice into which he could push himself, some tunnel into which he could bolt. As he jumped down the other side, he saw several guards standing in the beams of their pick-ups, and he knew the chase was over. He stumbled towards them, heaving for air, and then fell to his knees. After a few seconds, he found a small, scratchy voice. ‘Where are you going to take me?’ he asked. A man in a dark suit came forward through the blinding beams of light, offering a hand to help him onto his feet. ‘We’re going to take you to our leader,’ he said, smiling.

A simultaneous structure. In the 1971 film The Andromeda Strain, directed by Robert Wise, a ‘crystalline’ alien virus lands in the American desert attached to a meteorite, and causes catastrophic effects on the human circulatory system, The focus of the narrative is to find a solution for this virus through scientific means: by understanding why a very young baby and an alcoholic old man did not fall victim to the virus that devastated a small desert town. A group of scientists descend 5 ‘biologically cleaner’ underground levels of a top-secret base until they arrive at a secure and sterile environment in which to study the alien life form. This base is located at Lake Mead, Nevada, south-east of Las Vegas and on the opposite point of the compass to the Groom Lake testing grounds. Its location places the base in a clear relation to both underground nuclear missile silos and secure Cold War ‘bunkers’ used to protect military chains of command in the event of a nuclear war.

Still from The Andromeda Strain (dir: Robert Wise, 1971).

The security of biological hygiene is short lived in The Andromeda Strain, however: the virus also corrodes the flexible seals that close off ‘secure’ spaces. It is not by human agency that the virus is rendered harmless: it mutates into a non-lethal form, and it is the failure to ‘destroy’ the virus by a nuclear detonation (that would have caused exponential mutation and growth and widespread dissemination of the virus) that is the major human achievement therein. The Andromeda Strain is a diagnostic text for Cold War science fiction in its discourses of hygiene and security, and its near-phobic coding of the alien as biological other. In Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964), the insane SAC General Jack D. Ripper’s paranoia migrates from Reds-under-the-bed rhetoric to phobias about his own body: he avoids fluoridated water (and sexual orgasm) as he is concerned to protect the integrity of his own ‘precious bodily fluids’ from contamination. This discourse informs The Andromeda Strain, as it does Ballard’s Hello America (1981), where the (again, insane) ‘President’ Charles Manson reveals to the protagonist Wayne his use of the remaining American nuclear stockpile after an environmental catastrophe has rendered the USA half desert, half jungle:

‘I had to take them out, Wayne, there was a threat of plague in the east. I used the old cruise missiles. Before his breakdown my partner renovated the warheads and guidance systems. They’re slow but reliable, like homing pigeons going back to a hot supper. Think of it as a necessary prophylactic measure.’[9]

The ‘plague’ is the threat of the eastern seaboard of North America being re-colonised from Europe: the discourses of infection and ‘cure’ are deployed to rationalise the destruction of a threat of invasion.

Six of One. The dark-suited man offered little in the way of conversation as they sped along Groom Lake Road in the pick-up, but his body language was unthreatening, even friendly. The other guards had gone about their business, leaving him alone with the suited man, although he had been asked, politely, to hand over the Walther. The police-band radio squawked occasionally on the dash, but there seemed little else going on in the Range. The sun was coming up behind and to the left of them, and the desert was emerging from the night in grey and blue and ochre. The pick-up slowed as it approached what seemed to be an abandoned desert diner, a dusty roadside shack with wooden porch and lettering on the roof, an old Burma-Shave sign out front, and long dark shadows painted across the blacktop. Parked at an angle to the porch was a clean, black government-issue Cadillac, the kind of car that Agency officers drove, not without a sense of irony, around Langley. As they pulled up in a volume of dust, he wondered who the driver could be.

Ballard’s short-story collection ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1988), with Ernst’s ‘Europe After the Rain’ on the cover.

L’Amerique sidereal. The military-industrial complex, a phrase coined by President Eisenhower in a jeremiad delivered on his leaving office, is crucial to the post-war economy of Southern California. According to Dale Carter:

Simultaneously, by transferring over $17.5 billion to the southern and western United States between Fiscal years 1962 and 1969, the space agency’s budget made a proportionally greater contribution to what was ultimately the more painful mechanism, not only of the Rocket State’s growth but also of its eventual succession. The contribution itself had two distinct yet related dimensions. On the one hand, the more than $13 billion worth of prime contracts and subcontracts which initiated the rapid growth of the Cape Canaveral region and secured the prosperity of the Houston and Los Angeles industry and commerce during the 1960s indirectly helped elevate new generations of Florida real estate speculators, California construction firms, and other Sunbelt entrepreneurs and financiers: a new community  of interest born of the Vietnam war boom whose relative independence from the power elite’s east coast operational core would allow them to ride out the recessions of the early 1970s and underwrite the rise of the New Right during the rest of the decade.

On the other hand, vast prime contracts awarded to companies like Boeing and North American Rockwell by NASA during the 1960s directly fuelled corporate giants which, while more closely aligned with the Republican establishment or pro-military Democrats than with the New Right’s highest circles, were nevertheless integral to Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 (234-5)

The American ‘rocket state’, in which the space program (and especially Apollo) acts as the spectacle element in the economic system of the Cold War, is most in evidence in the prosperity of Southern California and Florida, both critical sites for Ballard’s short fictions.

***

Now: Zero. On an American roulette wheel, there are 36 numbers, 18 red and 18 black, from 1 to 36. There are also two green sections of the wheel: Zero (0) and Double Zero (00). Both pay the house.

***

Seven Days to Noon. Strangely, the dark-suited man used some kind of electronic card-reader and keypad to open the door of the diner, which led directly down a short flight of steps. He blinked in the bright overheads as he took in a modern institutional canteen, in brushed steel, white melamine and glass. Several men, Special Agents by the cut of their jackets, were collecting food at a self-service counter, while others sipped coffee, chatted or scanned documents at an archipelago of small tables. At one, a tall chestnut-haired woman in a midnight-blue trouser suit stood up and faced them, as the dark-suited man guided him by the elbow to her table. Now he knew he the driver was. ‘Felicity Vespertine,’ he said, smiling. ‘Why are you here?’ ‘B,’ she said warmly, clasping his hand firmly and pulling him toward her, kissing him on both cheeks. ‘Howard,’ she said to his companion, could you grab a couple of coffees for us before you go, and a sandwich? B here looks famished.’ ‘I think the word you’re looking for, Felicity,’ said B, ‘is finished.’

Macrocosmic Null-X. In Hello America, the young protagonist Wayne finds himself, towards the end of the narrative, in a mocked-up ‘War Room’ at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, in which the deranged President Manson spins a roulette wheel to determine which ‘infected’ North American city will be targeted by what remains of the Cold War nuclear arsenal. Reluctantly, Wayne throws:

Zero.

Wayne watched the ball circle the illuminated bowl, safe and defused in its empty niche. No city was marked against it!

With relief he blurted: ‘Mr President, there’s nothing there, no city – ’

Manson laughed affably, the chuckle of a conjuror who has just deceived a small child.

‘Zero pays the house, Wayne.’ (215-6)

In his article ‘”Zero Pays the House”: The Las Vegas Novel and Atomic Roulette’, Ken Cooper suggests that Las Vegas and ‘the bomb’ are inextricably intertwined, not only by the city’s proximity to the Nevada testing grounds, but through metaphor: ‘everyone is a subject of the nuclear state; we are all in the same casino. So, to extend the metaphor, How do we get out of the casino when we’re tired of playing atomic roulette?’[10] The ‘game’ of MAD is a game of chance, but all outcomes are ultimately that of defeat. Wayne in Hello America, however, flees the city by ‘Sunlight Flier’, a fleet of crystalline human-powered aircraft that provide an irresistibly surrealist gloss on Ballard’s motif of flight as transcendence. The dream of Las Vegas inhabited by Wayne, that of a ‘past America [and] city of antique gamblers’ (236), is itself the final victim of the logic of the Cold War.

Vapours. Patient B had arrived at the clinic in Vermillion Sands some three months ago, after a long convalescence in Geneva. The Swiss clinicians had performed exemplary work on B’s physical injuries – on cursory examination, one would hardly notice the fractured tibia, cracked hip, two broken patellas and contusions around sternum and ribcage – but B’s physical condition was of less concern to Bluffield than the psychological. B was clearly a highly intelligent individual, but his strongly practical cast of mind caused him to disengage from Bluffield’s approaches, or even reject them outright. B had no interest in the problem, it seemed, no insight into his own psychological processes, and Bluffield had failed to interest his patient intellectually in the clinical models at work. B seemed content to live in a quotidian world of regular exercise and small-scale concerns. To explain that, Bluffield knew, there was no need for recourse to deep theoretical structures.

Helios. Apollo, the Greek and Roman god of the arts, but also of rationality and architecture, became increasingly identified with Helios, the sun god, in Hellenic times. Why is Apollo, the sun-deity, named for the NASA moon programme? Perhaps the reason is that Apollo is patron of the arts and of philosophy, of music (of the spheres) and science. Apollo is also an oracular god, implicitly a deity of what is to come. More troublingly, perhaps, Apollo was the centre of a cult of masculine youth. With goddesses Artemis/ Selene more properly identified with the moon, is the NASA Apollo program a conquering, or erasure, of the cosmologically feminine?

Tune into Ballardian.com for Part 2: the final thrilling instalment of Brian Baker’s APOLLO ROULETTE!

[1] Dale Carter, The Final Frontier: The Rise and Fall of the American rocket State (London: Verso, 1988), p. 153
[2] William Gibson, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, ed. Bruce Sterling (London: Paladin, 1988), pp.1-11 (p.7).
[3] J.G. Ballard, Vermillion Sands (1971) (London: Phoenix, 1992).
[4] J.G. Ballard, ‘Introduction’ to Crash (1973) (London: Vintage, 1995), unpaginated.
[5] Jean Baudrillard, America, (1986) (London: Verso, 2010), pp.137-8.
[6] J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) (London: Harper Perennial, 2006).
[7] Baudrillard, America, p.133.
[8] Baudrillard, America, p.4.
[9] JG Ballard, Hello America (1981) (London: Flamingo, 1993), ch.20, p.154.
[10] Ken Cooper, ‘”Zero Pays the House”: The Las Vegas Novel and Atomic Roulette’, Contemporary Literature 33:3, Fall 1992, 528-544(p.534)

Jeremy Reed at the JG Ballard Memorial, 2009. Photo: Rick McGrath.

West End Survival Kit, by Jeremy Reed. Furze Hill, Hove: Waterloo Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-906742-07-2.

JEREMY REED IS A HUGELY PROLIFIC poet, novelist, biographer and spoken-word musician, the author of 15 novels, 16 poetry collections and 14 works of non-fiction since 1984. Yet despite that phenomenal output, he remains an exile in British letters. According to Reed, ‘People have reacted so nastily to me and tried to airbrush me out of the picture… The establishment never forgave me, because I used to give readings in heavy make-up’. That’s not a working method that was ever going to appeal to Sir Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, who famously dubbed Reed ‘that effete little pseud’. He also sledged him as the ‘David Bowie of the poetry circuit’, an especially backhanded insult, given Reed’s sartorial style and the fact that among his back catalogue are biographies on Lou Reed, Marc Almond and Brian Jones. In fact, the latter provided one very revealing insight into the mind of Jeremy Reed. Once asked what he thought was the defining moment of the 60s, he replied: ‘I’d say it was the first time Brian Jones wore a girl’s polka-dotted blouse. It had never been done before’. In the same interview, he derided ‘the barbiturate poetry of Andrew Motion and those post-Larkin poets. Very grey, very drab’. And so the stage is set.

Following the pattern of this exile, whenever there is talk about the latter-day British writers who enjoyed the friendship, patronage or thematic repertoire of J.G. Ballard, invariably the same names are mentioned: Will Self and Iain Sinclair. Not Reed. Yet Reed and Ballard enjoy a long and very intriguing relationship. Reed’s science-fiction novel Diamond Nebula (1994), set in the 23rd century, even featured a film-director character obsessed by Bowie, Ballard and Warhol:

Her eye was arrested by an open photograph album … David Bowie at the Rainbow Theatre, 1972; at the LA Forum in 1976; Hiroshima, 1973; LA Amphitheatre, 1974; Wembley, 1976: the images seeming to have been chosen for their visual diversity and metamorphoses. Over the page were weirdly angled shots of Ballard getting into his car at Shepperton after the publication of Crash; and then the publicity photographs of him that had appeared on the jackets of High-Rise and Myths of the Near Future, together with a series of solarized images in the manner of Man Ray, in which the writer’s head was superimposed on Brancusi sculptures. Cindy flicked through the obsessive preoccupations: Warhol screened by black glasses on a couch at the Factory, and then seen filming Edie Sedgwick and Gino Persicho in Beauty 2; and a few pages on, isolated, filming Chelsea Girls.

Jeremy Reed, Diamond Nebula.

These aren’t the ordinary images of Ballard (let alone Bowie) that get bandied about. They are cult snapshots, taken by a writer with a fan’s eye for obscure detail surrounding the object of worship. As an alternative biography, then, of its three avant-garde celebrities, Diamond Nebula is a tantalising work, drawing on Reed’s main obsessions: style, flashy pop, mutation (both psychic and physical), cult fame, inner space … and Ballard. In the preface to the book, Reed describes ‘Ballard as the chief proponent of the futuristic novel … seen as the person most receptive to occupying a colony that looks towards the arrival of mutants from another galaxy’. Reed talks of creating an environment in which ‘the external world provides a backdrop to the exploration of inner space, a vanishing-point rather than a structure for continuous reference’, and with further reference to the ‘geography of the unconscious’, it’s easy to realise the superficial similarities with Ballard’s own working methods and obsessions.

Jeremy Reed speaking to Nicky Singer at the ICA.

In interview, too, Reed always pays his dues, recording his writerly debt to Ballard’s ‘visionary present’ – an especial act of linguistic engagement that ‘transform[s] the universe into its imagined equivalent’ and provides an instruction manual in ‘blowing up the social structure’. He sees Ballard’s work as a hotwire to the pure, uncut imaginative spirit that also powers the work of Stephen Barber and Edmund White:

They all have that very charged language. When I began as a writer, Ballard was the writer who had a new language that I was looking for, the way he crystallised the modern world into images. It’s something that he has never lost. Ballard is not part of literature at any level, he’s got no concern about it at all. He’s a rogue gene which is what attracted me to him from the start. And work is all he is, what he writes is so integral to him. That’s all he does all day, write all day and live in Shepperton.

But the admiration cut both ways. According to Rick McGrath, Ballard provided blurbs for 12 of Reed’s books and wrote forewords to two others, more JGB endorsements than for any other writer. One of the forewords was for Reed’s latest collection of poetry, West End Survival Kit (2009), possibly the last writing Ballard had published, in which he enthuses about Reed’s ‘talent … almost extraterrestrial in its brilliance’. For Ballard, Reed is ‘Rimbaud reconfigured as the Man who fell to Earth, a visitor from deep space whose time machine was designed by Lautréamont and de Sade, and powered by the most exotic fuels the imagination has ever devised’. That’s a very dense sentence, pricking imagistic sensors of recognition in almost every one of its 36 words: Bowie, Roeg, symbolism, science fiction, surrealism, film, sadomasochism, inner space…

And so it is with these poems, which are compacted like diamonds, an intent signalled by this excerpt:

firing ideas at me like big hitters
for work we do
shape-shifting architecture into words,

the way 10 million atoms colonize
an inked full stop.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream’, West End Survival Kit.

The back cover gives no real description of the contents, save for general endorsements from a stellar cast: Ballard, David Gascoyne, David Lodge and Seamus Heaney. We are led to believe that this is a collection of free-standing poems, and reading them is simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting. Reed is obsessed with both surface flash and the hidden layers of meaning inherent in modern urban life, with which we constantly negotiate and are in dialogue with: the meaning of ‘junk DNA’ and the enigma of Michael Jackson, the sigils in corporate signage, the mental cross-chatter engendered by rapid communications technology. His street-level descriptions are often as unfathomable as conspiracy theory, and shot through with a selection of barely glimpsed, constantly rotating characters (including a first-person narrator), invariably described within a mesh of techy jargon:

meditating in front of his mezzanine.
His girlfriend paints her toes
in Howard Hodgkin moods,

reads Holy Anorexia and grooves
at being air
she’s molecules wired to neuronal drive.

He’s into ‘dark matter’, lab neutrinos,
thermonuclear fusion
generating energy in the sun.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Astroparticle Physicist Chills’, West End Survival Kit.

The writing is a rush, a blur. It’s slippery, emphasised by quick-fire, three-line stanzas:

They share headphones on the new R.E.M.:
a shimmering slice of post-modern pop,
impersonal as an airport lounge,

riffy, mid-tempo anomie
for the 21st century.
He wears a Titian red Gucci jacket,

as though it’s cut out of the sun,
and she two dollops of mauve eye shadow
co-ordinating with her top.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Endgames’, West End Survival Kit.

Certain motifs begin to gestate a picture in the mind as you gradually learn through half-remembered, diaphanous glimpses that Mars and the moon have been colonised; dispossessed astronauts wander the Earth; drugs are rampant; and technological virtuality is encoded into the very fabric of everyday life. By the end, you are left with the inkling that the poems are perhaps not free-standing, but part of a continuous (albeit fractured) narrative, illuminated snapshots of a mordant near-future world seen from multiple, cross-linked perspectives. They could be interior hallucinations, or the exterior unspooling vision of CCTV cameras all over the city, but whatever they are, they are engendered by Reed’s very effective trick of repeating a motif, phrase or word from one poem to the next, but never more than two poems in a row. Subliminally, you become aware of a deep, unfolding narrative, even if consciously you assess that you are reading two poems with very different characters:

ten miles above Cape Canaveral.
He journeys back in his neurology
to pink skies over the oxygen plant,

graffiti discovered on a rock face –
RAD51D — the king’s returned —
and gantried higher up a gold statue

Jeremy Reed, ‘Red Planet Blues’, West End Survival Kit.

Someone’s got the dangling hexagonal
molecule RAD51D
under scrutiny for cell death

like a registration number
on a top security Jeep.
She’s paid to disinform. Each day

Jeremy Reed, ‘Drug Giant PA’, West End Survival Kit.

Given all the Ballard associations, it’s tempting to read Ballardian themes into the work (the damaged astronauts fit well) and the densified prose method strives to convey as much meaning as the ‘condensed novels’ in The Atrocity Exhibition. Vaughan from Crash (and Atrocity) even makes an appearance, enmeshed in a shady deal with the clone of Princess Di:

H.R.H. has a contract out
on this blonde afterlife simulacrum:
Di as an endlessly repeatable clone.

Vaughan knows he’s watched. The Jeep outside
has on-board machine guns, a snoop
positioned in it with a cold black eye.

Jeremy Reed, ‘The Reckoning’, West End Survival Kit.

Jeremy Reed – photograph courtesy Waterloo Press.

But in the end, the most obvious reference point seems to be the glistening, cypher-filled, pop-artefact worlds of William Gibson. The characters in West End Survival Kit come on like Case from Neuromancer crashlanding in London (which has merged with Tokyo, as it did in Reed’s 2008 novel The Grid), as if Case was too burnt out to even care about fixing his damaged neurosystem, too jaded to even muster up any more passion for his beloved cyberspace. In her review of The Grid, Bidisha wrote that ‘one wishes Reed would produce a scholarly work about Jacobean theatre instead of an inexpert cyber-romp. His next work should be excellent, but it shouldn’t meddle with the future. Reed’s seriousness and intelligence emerge when he drops his coolness and cleaves to the past’. But this sounds more like the kind of genre snobbery Ballard was forced to endure when he, too, dared to write science fiction. Reed does post-cyberpunk very well: he has a real feel for the imagery, the characters and the worldview, and like both Gibson and Ballard, he is interested in the next 5 minutes rather than the next 500 years. For Reed, too, science fiction is the sociological study of the present. Yet he infuses this with his own ‘extraterrestrial’ brand of theatricality, poetic sensibility and mutant, gender-bending attitude to create a hybrid form. As science-fiction poetry, it recalls the work of Robert Calvert, the late Hawkwind lyricist and lead singer, and another tortured anti-hero whose own life story could easily inhabit the Reed pantheon.

Towards the end of West End Survival Kit, Reed ties it all up with two poems about, of all things, the history of Pink Floyd. And given all of the above, it makes perfect sense. As the poem identifies, the classic-era Floyd, despite being saddled with what people assumed was an intergalactic persona, was always more about inner space than outer (like Ballard’s anomie-infested astronauts), producing a brace of albums that reflected with sensitivity on battered individuals like their founder Syd Barrett, as in Wish You Were Here, and the assorted lunatics in the cast of Dark Side of the Moon. The Floyd poems make a fitting coda to Reed’s painful folio of snapshots from a numb world. They solidify his eulogy to people too disconnected, too exiled in their own minds to ever tread ‘meaningful’ paths through life, but who nonetheless retain a unique sense of self allied to their damaged intelligence:

Barrett’s the rock astronomer
boating the Cam’s lime green spine,
wristing downriver like a water-boatman

listening to voices, his schizophrenia
big in the mix
like invasive radio.
…
Echoing slide. It’s paranoia synthesised –
their moon trip – dark side in reverse.
Barrett’s still running through a corridor

As undertow, a brain damaged psycho.
The music road maps inner space.
It’s like a river knocking at the door.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Brain Damage: a short history of the Pink Floyd’, West End Survival Kit.

It’s out there somewhere, while the London rain

slashes the light-polluted scuzz,
wacks down fried leaves, keeps me inside
this rainy, orange October day,
retrieving the Floyd’s mission to locate
the alien in the psychopath.
Outside my window a wet jay

jabs at a red berry gash.
I go out on their dimension,
beamed by the music’s escalating curve,
back to my youth and Apollo
cargoing human hardware to the moon –

their weighted boots grating on dust,
Pink Floyd the terrestrial soundtrack
to space conquest, a white plateau
opening out to three astronauts
learning by hesitant degrees to trust.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Wish You Were Here’, West End Survival Kit.

West End Survival Kit is not wholly successful (although it’s pretty close). It briefly falls flat, for example, when Reed makes reference to ‘psychogeography’, a loaded concept degraded through cultural overuse that, although undoubtedly inherent within the work, sounds inauthentic when actually named and nudged up against his own dream geographies. Yet mostly, Reed’s innate ability to explore new genres, new forms and new plans of attack in the hope of creating something extreme and unique makes the work well worth reading. As Bidisha implies, it is probably this genre slippage that is the real cause of Reed’s exile, but somehow, given the figures with which he identifies, you get the impression that on some level that’s how he likes it.

‘Video surveillance sights the street. The city leaks pathology…’ We know exactly what Jeremy means, though we may never have thought of our everyday world in these terms. The poet is our extraterrestrial visitor, calmly surveying everything, the highspeed neural networks of his poetic gift assessing the landscape, making only the most important connections, linking the present moment to the most vital possibilities of itself … Use this volume of poems as a guide-book to the present, to the real world of possibility that most of us ignore. It’s the poet’s job to be a seer, to seize us by the shoulders and force us to out-stare the mirage. Reading these poems, I find myself marvelling at their cleverness and brilliance, and saying: ‘…yes, yes, absolutely.’

J.G. Ballard, foreword to West End Survival Kit.

West End Survival Kit can be purchased direct from the publisher.

Jeremy Reed performing with Itchy Ear as The Ginger Light, ‘a progressive poetry act’.

Jeremy Reed – photographer(s) unknown.

Thanks to Shane for help with research for this article.

..:: More information:
+ Jeremy Reed
+ Waterloo Press

REFERENCES
Bidisha (2008). ‘The Grid, by Jeremy Reed’. The Independent, 28 September.
Carter, Randolph (2006). ‘Dreaming with his eyes open’. 3am Magazine.
Lachman, Gary (2006). Jeremy Reed: A supernova in orange and purple ink. The Independent, 30 July.
Reed, Jeremy (1994) Diamond Nebula. London: Peter Owen.
———- (2008). West End Survival Kit. Furze Hill, Hove: Waterloo Press.

Over at Fantastic Journal, Charles Holland has a fabulous post that begins with a rumination on the 1:43 scale model of JFK’s presidential limo sitting on his mantelpiece, and makes its way to a very perceptive analysis of the nature of conspiracy theory as it applies to Ballard’s Atrocity short, ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’:

Ballard’s story differs from conspiracy theory in an important respect. Although, like them, it uses collage and displacement – the sliding in one of one scenario for another, storylines and characters cut and pasted from alternative worlds* – it works through absurdity, highlighting the seam between the accepted reality and the absurd version he posits in its place. Ballard’s story uses collage as an avant garde device of radical disjunction and violent displacement… Conspiracy theory strives for truth, but one that always slips away. By casting doubt on truth in the first place it inherently unbalances itself. Despite its controversy at the time of writing, Ballard’s story is as much a satire on conspiracy theory as it is a tasteless deflation of the importance of the event itself.

More at Fantastic Journal.